Communication devices, such as cellular phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptops, and computers, provide users with a variety of communication services and networking capabilities. End users of these communication devices have access to various network services offered by a network operator in a communication network, most prominent being voice and data services. Typically, the communication network provides a communication link between the various communication devices for utilizing the network services.
The communication networks typically use pre-defined standards and protocols for providing the communication links between the communication devices. Further, with the continuous evolution and development of new standards, network services offered to an end user of the communication device have improved in terms of quality, such as better uplink and downlink speed to the end user. The end user of the communication device may thus avail network services and consequently share lot of data over the network using the communication device. The data shared over the network might be confidential and in some cases may be private and of great importance to the end user, for example, the data may include bank account details of the end user. However, with the increase in the network services offered, chances of risks to a end user by, for example, fraudulent use of the end user's communication device by a fraudulent user by way of stealing or cloning has increased.
For instance, in case the fraudulent user gets access to the end user's communication device, the fraudulent user may use the network services, such as web access, phone calls, and messaging activated on the communication device. Use of such network services may result not only in monetary loss to the end user of a network operator but also to security threat. Further, the fraudulent user may cause security threat to the end user as the fraudulent user may either access various online websites to which the end user may have logged in on the communication device or use the communication devices for antisocial activities, such as making unsolicited calls.
In a conventional technique of preventing such fraudulent uses the communication devices are re-authenticated after a predetermined interval of time to verify authenticity of the communication device. Re-authenticating the communication device thus facilitates in preventing the fraudulent user from accessing the network services offered by the network operator. However, using such a periodic re-authentication of the communication devices may not prevent an unauthorized access as the fraudulent user may avail the network services to a large extent in the interval between two re-authentications. For instance, where the predetermined interval is large the fraudulent user may download a large volume of data without requiring any authentication, resulting in huge risks to the end user.